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Brillyant comments on Why I haven't signed up for cryonics - Less Wrong
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Just like future cryonics research might be able to revive someone who was frozen now, perhaps future time travellers could revive people simply by rescuing them from before their death. Of course, time travellers can't revive people who died under all circumstances. Someone who dies in a hospital and has had an autopsy couldn't be rescued without changing the past.
Therefore, we should start a movement where dying people should make sure that they die inside hermetically sealed capsules that are placed in a vault which is rarely opened. If time travel is ever invented, time travellers could travel to a time and place inside the vault right after a dying person has been deposited, rescue the dying person, and take them to the future to cure their disease. Because the vault is closed, nobody can see them appear, and because the capsules are sealed, nobody from our time can tell that the contents of the capsule has been replaced. This would allow the time travellers to rescue such people without changing the past. It would even beat out cryonics since the capsules could be destroyed after enough time has passed for the patient to either die or be rescued--there's no need for permanent maintenance. (But don't ever destroy them in such a way that lets you tell if there was a body inside--if you do that, the person can no longer be revived without changing the past.)
This method of revival is not only cheaper than cryonics, it's also incompatible with cryonics since if you allow someone's body to be frozen as they die, you're watching the death, and time travellers can't rescue them from before their death without changing the past--this method requires that they die out of sight of everyone.
In order to work, this should be accompanied by spending money on time travel research.
Would you like to live forever?
For just 50$ monthly fee, agents of Time Patrol Institute promise to travel back in time extract your body a few miliseconds before death. In order to avoid causing temporal "parodxes", we pledge to replace your body with (almost) identical artificially constructed clone. After your body is extracted and moved to closest non-paradoxical future date we will reverse damage caused by aging, increase your lifespan to infinity and treat you with a cup of coffee.
While we are fully aware that time travel is not yet possible, we believe that recent advances in nanotechnology and quantum physics, matched by your generous donations would hopefully allow us to construct a working time machine at any point in the future.
Why not Cryonics?
For all effective altruists in the audience, please consider that utility of immortalizing entire humankind is preferable to saving only those few of us who underwent cryonic procedures. If you don't sign your parents for temporal rescue, you are a lousy son. People who tell you otherwise are simply voicing their internalized deathist-presentists prejudices.
For selfish practically minded agents living in the 2014, please consider that while in order for you to benefit from cryonics it is mandatory that correct brain preservation techniques are developed and popularized during your lifespan, time travel can be developed at any point in the future, there is no need for hurry.
Regards, Blaise Pascal, CEO of TPI
What?!!? Not tea? I unwilling to be reborn into such a barbaric environment.
Wouldn't it be simpler to convert to Mormonism? :-D
Why not? Just replace them with a remote-controlled clone, or upload them from afar (using magic, obviously), or rewrite everyone's memories of you ...
Putting a body in a sealed capsule in a vault requires no magical technology (not counting the time travel itself). Someone who has time travel but otherwise our present level of technology could rescue someone who is allowed to die using the vault method. (Although hopefully they do have better medical technology or rescuing the dying person wouldn't do much good.)
It's true, of course, that if the time travellers have other forms of advanced technology they might be able to rescue a wider range of people, but the safest way to go is to use my method. Note that time travel interacts with cryonics in the same way: perhaps you don't need to freeze someone because a future person could time-travel and upload them from afar. Besides, why would you take the risk of the time travellers not being able to do this, considering that being put in a capsule for a few days is pretty cheap? You're a lousy parent if you don't sign your kids up for it....
What is your estimate of the ratio of the probability of my being "rescued" given a sealed capsule, to that of my being rescued absent a sealed capsule?
I have no idea. I'm sure I could come up with an estimate in a similar manner to how people make estimates for cryonics, though.
Well, obviously here you run into your priors as to what sort of tech level is implied by time travel - much as discussions of cryonics run into the different intuitions people have about what a future where we can bring back the frozen will look like.
("The only economic incentive for such an expensive project - except perhaps for a few lucky individuals who would be used as entertainment, like animals in a zoo - would be to use them as an enslaved labor force.")
With that said ...
... once time travel has come into play, surely all that matters is whether the magical technology in question will eventually be developed?
Not only do you need to have time travellers, you need to have time travellers who are interested in reviving you. The farther in the future you get the less the chance that any time travellers would want to revive you (although they might always want someone for historical interest so the chance might never go down to zero.) The more advanced the technology required, the longer it'll be and the less the chance they'll want to bother.
Perhaps you could go the cryonics-like route and have a foundation set up whose express purpose is to revive people some time in the future in exchange for payments now. While unlike cryonics there is no ongoing cost to keep you in a position where you can be saved, the cost to keep someone wanting to save you is still ongoing. This would still be subject to the same objections used for cryonics foundations. Of course, like cryonics, you can always hope that someone creates a friendly AI who wants to save as many people as it can.
There's also the possibility that some technology simply will not be developed. Perhaps there are some fundamental quantum limits that prevent getting an accurate remote scan of you. Perhaps civilization has a 50% chance of dying out before they invent the magical technology.
Like I said, I guess this comes down to how you imagine such a future looking beyond "has time travel". I tend to assume some sort of post-scarcity omnibenevolent utopia, myself ...
Before they invent any magical technology, you mean. There's more than one conceivable approach to such a last-second rescue.